When Richie Kotite became coach of the Jets in 1995 and I was out at their camp one day, he fished in his wallet and pulled out a little, laminated newspaper clipping. It was something from my All-Met piece in 1960, the capsule comment I had written on him. “Headed for the big time,” I had written.
I remember driving down to Poly Prep in Brooklyn in the rain and watching him against Horace Mann, my alma mater.
“I never forgot that,” he said, “and I never forgot that dinner at Mamma Leone’s.”
Nostalgia means magnification by many degrees, but we had an awfully good staff on the Telly. Willard Mullin was and remains to this day the greatest sports cartoonist who ever lived. The Brooklyn Dodger Bum was his creation. He would hand in his cartoons on huge, white poster boards, and they would just lie around the office afterward, to be thrown out by the cleaning crew. One night I decided that it was a shame to see them trashed, so I took a bunch home. It was one of the few smart things I ever did in my life because they sell for about $500 apiece now in the Leland’s sports auctions, and anything with the Brooklyn Dodger Bum on it is pushing four figures.
Joe Williams was the imperious column figure, Lester Bromberg ranked with the Mirror’s Dan Parker as the country’s greatest boxing writer, Joe King was a respected veteran pro football reporter, and Larry Robinson? Well, few people looked more like a big-time sportswriter than he did.
In 1954, my senior football season at Columbia, we traveled to Penn to scrimmage the Quakers before the season began. Larry Robinson was the only sportswriter who made the trip. He was tight with our coach, Lou Little. On the way back, the team stopped in some fancy pizzeria for a meal, and we ate in a banquet room that had a kind of raised dais in front. Coach Little sat there, next to Robinson, whose elaborate cravat, topped off by a big, round, florid face and huge mop of white hair gave him the look of a person who would be not out of place covering the Crimean War or the League of Nations … certainly someone who might stop your heart stone dead if he decided to interview you. So during the meal, we would get up from time to time and stroll past the dais, displaying ourselves before this legend of a sportswriter, who was deep in conversation with the coach, as they ate their spaghetti. Chest out, heads tucked down into our necks … please, God, let this man interview us. Finally Coach Little looked up and noticed this passing parade.
“All right, you matinee idols,” he growled in that raspy voice of his. “Back to your seats.”
Our baseball writer was Dan Daniel, the first president of the Baseball Writers Association, winner of every award obtainable and generally conceded to be the most authoritative figure in the sport. He’d been the official scorer for 20 of the 56 games in Joe DiMaggio’s consecutive hitting streak in 1941. When Lester Bromberg was covering a fight in Havana in the 1950s he ran into Ernest Hemingway, who asked him, “How’s Dan Daniel … that great writer?”
Nobody could remember when Dan started writing for the Telly, but he once told me he wrote his first bylined story, for the New York Herald, five years before Babe Ruth broke into the major leagues, which was 1914. When I first got to know Dan, he was 70, a loud, funny guy with a great sense of humor, a wonderful master of ceremonies who’d always take charge of our All-Met dinners. He wrote a wildly popular Tuesday feature called “Ask Daniel,” one of the first of the Mailbag columns that later became so fashionable. Dan had a temper, too, and nothing would set him off as much as the repeated question: “Didn’t one of Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs go into the stands on one bounce and shouldn’t it have been ruled a ground rule double?”
Like someone who couldn’t leave a sore tooth alone, he would always answer that particular query, his fury mounting with every response. “No! No! No! How many times will it take before your peanut brain can accept the fact that this never happened?” and so forth. And so naturally, the young guys on the staff, the bad boys such as me and Phil Pepe and a whacked out copy boy known as The Bomber, would pipe the question and slip it into his mailbox.
“Mr. Daniel, I certainly respect your knowledge, but my grandfather told me for a fact that one of Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs …” etc. And Dan would storm like King Lear. “What is wrong with these people?”
So I gradually moved up the ladder, from schoolboys to college sports, with an occasional look-see into the professional arena, a fairly smooth progression with one glitch. Sal Gerage, our night editor, had been enamored with an old Tim Cohane column of the early 1940s called Frothy Facts. He wanted to see it revived and he decided I was the guy to revive it. I was told to be bright and sparkling and lively.
Well, the urge to be clever is one that will destroy you; the straining will blow you apart. I look back on those columns now through fingers spread over my eyes. The less said the better. Occasionally a laugh or two, but clearly, I was not ready for that kind of action. The worst thing was what it did to my ego. Listen, everybody, I’m a columnist now! But there was one good element involved with the venture. At the bottom of each column, which appeared three times a week, was a little feature called: “10 Years Ago Today, and then 25 Years Ago Today.”
I got the items from our morgue, which had, in addition to old World-Telegrams, other papers as well. I had my own desk set up back there in the library. I’d get interested in murder trials of the 1930s, Korean War news, the pennant race of 1938. I’d start following old comic strips day after day … Terry and the Pirates, Dick Tracy, etc. I’d go in after lunch, and before I knew it, the night crew was coming into work. I was lost in a time warp. That’s where I found those great Frank Graham one-liners, the Joe Williams observation. I collected them, put them in a notebook.
In an old New York Daily News, I discovered an absolute gem, my all-time favorite one-liner from the editorial page. It was during the Cold War era, and the USSR and Communist China were showing signs of aggression toward each other. They were having a stare-down across the Yalu River, and the news was ecstatic that these two enemies of our country might actually come to blows. The editorial proclaimed how wonderful this all was, and then it ended: “Go to it, bums!”
After a while I started going back even further, into the 1920s, even though the research wouldn’t serve my column. I wanted to see what Paul Gallico was like before he quit in 1936 and wrote Farewell To Sport, which had been my bible. I wanted to read Grantland Rice day to day. I discovered an interesting thing, which I’ve mentioned before. The old timers were streak hitters, some stuff great, but occasionally they’d take a pass during a lull and concoct a whole piece about, say, the release of the weekly football statistics.
Rice was a hell of a yarn-spinner, though, and how many of today’s sportswriters, forgive me, media (God, how I hate that word) would pepper their stuff with verse. I particularly liked Rice’s story about when they were at the Yale Bowl, covering a football game, and afterward, as they were sitting in the press box, banging out their stories, a young writer, working hard to capture the mood, pointed at the setting sun and asked, “Is that the west over there?”
“Son,” Rice said, “if it ain’t, you’ve got yourself a hell of a story.”
Pretty good capsule on the sillier aspects of our profession, huh? I’ve only heard it put better two times. The first time was by Sonny Liston. Someone asked him why he didn’t like sportswriters, and he said, “A sportswriter looks up in the sky and asks you, ‘Is the sun shining?’” The second one, concerning writers in general, came from an Eskimo hunter north of Hudson Bay, a subject of frequent journalistc essays about life in the Far North.
“One day, newspaper,” he said, “Two day, magazine. One week, book.”
The king of the one-liners, in fact he would do periodic columns that would be nothing but them, was Jimmy Cannon of the New York Post. Everyone read them and quoted them. His column was called “Nobody Asked Me, But …”
“I don’t like Boston because every man looks like me.”
“If Howard
Cosell were a sport, it would be Roller Derby.”
“Chances are the lady’s miserable if she wears a heart-shaped locket she bought herself.”
“Men who eat a lot of candy don’t do much boasting.”
High school columnists tried to copy him, magazine writers, talk show hosts. Nobody could do it as Jimmy could. His regular columns were terrific, too, at least to my way of thinking. He had been influenced by Hemingway, an old drinking buddy, and he favored short, punchy sentences, bullet style at times. And then he’d go long and wrap it all up. He got a lot of emotion into his pieces, still in that hard style. It rubbed off on a lot of us. Toward the end of his life — he died in 1973 — he reaped a bit of scorn from the younger writers because of his unabashed appeal to the heart, at times. He was also not comfortable to be around. He had a way of complaining about things. I see a lot of him in myself.
Gallico’s Farewell to Sport might have been the single most influential sports book I read as a youngster, but Cannon became my journalistic idol and remained so. I started reading him in high school and seldom missed one of his columns. One of them, a piece on the 1948 Notre Dame-Northwestern game, I cut out and pasted to mirror. In it he described a kid who had suffered a head injury in the game and had a near-seizure in the locker room, a nasty contrast to the drunks still celebrating in the stadium. It made me almost quit football, repeat, almost.
In 1960, when I was leaving, in disgrace, from the Franklin Field press box after the Packers-Eagles championship game — disgrace because I had failed to provide the needed losing locker room quotes for Joe King — Cannon asked, “Anyone driving back to New York?” I offered a tentative, “Me.”
I had been in the business a year and a half. I kept my mouth shut for the most part, but l did offer one item for his Nobody Asked Me column, something I was meaning to send him.
“Let’s hear it,” he said.
I said that it always struck me funny that guys drinking at the bar in western movies always had the right change. The following week, when his next Nobody Asked Me column came out, I practically tore the paper open to get to it. It was the lead item. And five down from it was this one: “Guys who wear white socks look like they have sore feet.” I’d been wearing white socks.
He invited me up to his apartment on the West Side, and I had a couple of drinks and looked through a lot of memorabilia — Jimmy with Hemingway and Toots Shor and Jackie Gleason, Jimmy with his longtime girlfriend, the actress Ann Sothern, or maybe it was Joan Blondell. I always got the two confused. I heard a lot of stories.
In later years we became road compadres. I always liked to be on a football trip with him. I remember going up to a Jets game in Buffalo, and the day before, the Bills’ PR man, Jack Horrigan, took the Jets writers to that old battle wagon, War Memorial Stadium, to show us its new paint job.
“What do you think, Jimmy?” He asked afterward.
“Rouge on corpse,” Cannon said.
On the Jets bus from the airport to the hotel, Jimmy was sitting in the back, and for some reason, the conversation switched to great eaters of the past. He mentioned fat Jack Lavelle, always billed as the Giants’ super-scout, and Herman Hickman, the 300-pound Yale coach, and some skinny Englishman who’d had part of his stomach shot away in the war and couldn’t get filled up. Pretty soon the players started drifting back in twos and threes. By the time we got there, the front of the bus was empty, and back of it, around Jimmy’s seat, was packed. Some writer asked him how pudgy Leonard Koppett of The Times would have compared to the big boys.
“Kopett? Kopett?” Jimmy said, spitting it out as if it were a bad word. “He’s the kind of guy who starts every meal with a pound of Crisco.”
The two writers who were closest to Jimmy at the end were Dave Anderson of The Times and myself. We’d go everywhere, we’d always ask him to join us if we were going out to dinner. “We worship at the shrine, don’t we?” Dave once said. I agreed.
5. Super Bowl Memories
This column appeared on SI.com on Jan. 28, 2005.
The personal memories of covering 37 Super Bowls pile onto each other. Sometimes it’s hard to separate them. Action on the field fades, plays tend to blend into one another and, besides, the memories of the games involve only watching, not doing, or being part of. So what I will give you are little bonbons from the great feast of Super Bowls through the years, tiny tastes, and, of course, all of them purely personal. So here they are:
Fear and Loathing in Houston
Some years ago I used to run a writers’ handicapping pool. A buck a man, closest to the actual score takes it all. In 1974, Dolphins vs. Vikings in Houston, I was in the press room early, putting up my pool sheets on the bulletin board and I saw this bald-headed guy squinting at the rules of the contest in a not-too-focused fashion.
“I’m not a regular sports writer. You gonna let me in your pool?” he said. I recognized him as Hunter Thompson, whom I had read was covering that Super Bowl for Rolling Stone.
“Only if you’ve got a buck,” I told him. He assured me he had, so I told him to record his entry on the board.
“How about more than one pick, under different names?” he said. All of a sudden, it dawned on me that this was a guy who was going out of his way to seek rejection from authority figures, and that’s what I, of all people, must have represented to him.
“A buck a pick,” I told him. “Make ’em good names.”
He liked that. A fellow outlaw. None of his picks came close, and when his piece came out, he had done a real hatchet job on the writers, “Rozelle’s hand maidens,” he called them, except for yours truly. “Paul Zimmerman of the New York Post handled the writers’ handicapping pool in a professional manner,” he wrote. Yaaay!
“You feel like going out tonight?” he said that day in the press room. Sure, why not? Well, he took me to the toughest bar I’d ever been to in my life. Nothing but 250-pound street guys with ponytails. It was the kind of place where you drink your drink and stare straight ahead and speak when spoken to.
So we’re sitting there, and Hunter has been quiet and all of a sudden he says, out of the blue, “This place ain’t so tough.” Oh oh. There’s a general stirring around. See, the thing with him was that when he was stoned he got real quiet. I only learned that too late. The bartender leaned over and said to me, “You’d better get your buddy out of here.” Hunter overheard.
“No one’s running me out of here, I don’t care how tough he is.”
“Hunter, I’m leaving,” I told him. “You can either come with me or stay. I’ve got two small ones at home, and they’d like to see their daddy again.”
“Go on, I don’t give a damn,” he said and continued ranting in similar fashion. And yours truly showed the white feather and scrammed. Next day he showed up in the press room with bumps on his head and a few bruises. I never did find out what happened, and he didn’t mention it in his Rolling Stone piece either.
My Favorite Line
My favorite Super Bowl line came in the 1985 contest between the 49ers and Dolphins, the only one held in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is the big Wednesday interview session in the Amfac Hotel in Burlingame, and the ballroom doors have just opened, spilling forth a huge mass of writers with their notebooks and little carry-bags and stuff. A gigantic, lowing, mooing herd.
Two young women in Amfac uniforms are standing across the hall, and I hear one of them saying, “This is incredible … incredible … simply incredible.”
“What’s incredible?” I ask her.
“I’ve never seen so many straight guys in my life,” she says.
Mo$t Valuable Interview
Favorite Super Bowl interview — 1977 in Pasadena, Raiders vs. Vikings. Make that most valuable interview. I’m in Phil Villapiano’s room one afternoon. Those were the days when you could interview players anywhere at all. My Jersey buddy and all his paisa
ns are there, sitting around, eating hero sandwiches, drinking sodas and beer.
“Hey, you ever bet on games?” says Phil, the Raiders’ outside linebacker.
“I can’t … it wouldn’t be professional,” I told him.
“C’mon … you work for the New York Post, and I know the guys on that paper bet their asses off.” Which, of course, was true. Our sports editor, for instance, was a huge investor. So I told him, yeah, there was action in that office.
“Well, do ’em all a favor and tell ’em to put the house on us,” Phil said. “No way we won’t cover 6 1/2.”
I thanked him and so did the guys on the Post. Final score: Raiders 32, Vikes 14. Valuable interview, huh?
Cashing in on the Jets
Want to hear another wagering story? Sure. Jets vs. Colts, Super Bowl III. I’m covering it for the Post, as the Jets beat writer. Our columnist is Larry Merchant, whom you might see on TV, doing the fights on HBO from Vegas. I’m sure he moved out there to get closer to the action, because Larry liked to make a wager or two.
The opening line on the game is Colts minus 17. Larry bet the Jets with the points. He was coming off a good season and he had written a book telling people all about the secret of betting on NFL games. Its title was The National Football Lottery.
We’re staying in the Jets’ hotel, the Galt Ocean Mile in Fort Lauderdale, and the place is a zoo. Wives, kids, madness by the swimming pool, players being pestered, non-stop. There was a team revolt over what the players perceived as a plan to give them watches instead of Super Bowl rings, if they should win, and a near fight between Joe Namath and the Colts’ Lou Michaels, and all sorts of lunacy.
Dr. Z Page 9
